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Apple’s 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference brought a watershed moment for digital identity. The company announced support for the W3C Digital Credentials API (DC API), a powerful enabler for standards-based digital credential presentation, and announced its own Digital ID that will allow users without an mDL in the US to get through TSA checkpoints at airports.
This is more than a feature drop. It’s a market signal.
These moves from Apple bring new clarity and confidence to the digital credentials landscape, especially for verifiers: the businesses, agencies, and service providers relying on high-trust identity data to power seamless onboarding, access, and compliance flows.
This is the moment many of our customers have been waiting for: credible, mainstream digital ID supply, across both major platforms.
If you’ve been asking: “When will users actually have something I can verify?” The answer is: now.
In this blog, we’ll break down the two key announcements and explain what they mean for your product and strategy, whether you’re already exploring digital credentials, building your own solutions, or partnering with providers like MATTR to bring digital trust to life.
Apple’s Digital ID: Bringing more people into the digital trust ecosystem
Apple announced its own Digital ID, an identity document that can be stored in the Apple Wallet and accepted by services like the TSA or age-gated applications. Like Google’s ID Pass, this feature is currently US-only, but it marks a major investment in the supply side of digital credentials.
For verifiers, this means that millions of US-based users will soon have high-assurance credentials ready to share. The impact? Higher conversion rates, faster onboarding, and improved compliance with minimal friction.
But while the introduction of an Apple Digital ID is significant, the more transformative development is its support for the DC API, opening a new, interoperable pathway for identity verification across ecosystems, devices, and applications.
A major milestone: Apple adds support for the Digital Credentials API
For the first time, Apple is enabling presentation of digital credentials using the DC API to the web. This means customers using an Apple Wallet, as well as any third-party wallet developed on iOS, can now share their digital credentials with web applications in a streamlined and secure manner.
This announcement further supports the major shift introduced by the DC API in how identity and age verification occur online. It provides a more convenient, secure, privacy preserving and trusted way for consumers to perform this increasingly critical task, on any device or platform.
For some further background on some of the fundamental shifts the DC API has enabled check out our previous blog post on this topic:
Moving beyond wallet selection: How the Digital Credentials API can streamline digital credential workflows
More interoperability, less friction
This announcement goes beyond the Apple ecosystem. The technology behind it supports cross-platform interactions, making it possible for people using a mix of Apple and non-Apple devices to securely share and use their digital credentials.
On Android, Google’s Credential Manager API has been enabling similar capabilities, and with Apple now in the game relying parties can support credential presentation across browsers, devices, and wallets—without relying on platform-specific implementations.
Another standout feature is the use of native push notifications, which allow a web experience to prompt a nearby iPhone to present credentials without the need to scan a QR code. This creates a seamless and secure flow, marking a significant step forward in making credential verification feel natural and frictionless.
There are also a whole host of important privacy features in Apple’s implementation. For example, with the DC API verification requests can be signed using a trusted certificate. Wallets will only display credential selection UIs if the request matches this trust model, giving you fine-grained control over where and how credentials are used. This is ideal for private or restricted networks, where openness needs to be combined with assurance.
How it looks and feels
In the world of digital credentials, it's easy to focus narrowly on the mechanics of identity verification. After all, it's the part of the customer journey undergoing the most radical change. But as compelling as the technology is, the real value lies in the outcomes it enables. Most end users aren’t thinking about how seamless the credential verification was. They care about how quickly they could open a bank account, and how effortlessly the process unfolded. That’s why it’s important to zoom out and look at the full picture.
At MATTR, we’ve been participating in the W3C effort around the DC API since its inception, including participating in numerous technical interoperability events and showcases. Some of our publicly available demo sites which use MATTR products under the hood have supported the DC API over the past year, and we’re excited to begin extending their support to the Apple ecosystem.
This video demonstrates an end-to-end customer experience, showing how MATTR’s DC API supports a smooth and intuitive onboarding journey, removing barriers and friction while maintaining the highest standards of security and assurance:
From promise to practice
Verifiers and relying parties will now be able to accept credentials from any wallet that supports the DC API, regardless of OS or platform. This opens your services to a wider audience with less technical complexity. Here’s what this unlocks:
- Wider coverage: Accept credentials from iOS and Android, without platform lock-in
- Less complexity: Implement one standards-based flow using the DC API, instead of juggling bespoke integrations
- More users: Rely on built-in wallet support that reaches more people without asking them to download new apps
Other things you should know about Apple’s DC API support
- The feature is currently in beta and limited to developer previews of iOS 26 (with general availability expected in the September 2025 iOS release cycle). MATTR aims to support this capability in alignment with Apple’s general release.
- This experience only works on Safari and web views. We're still watching how Apple will approach native app-to-app verification, an area where Android has already provided a unified experience via the Android Credential Manager API.
- This feature will be tied to iOS 26 and above. For organizations concerned about rollout and adoption, MATTR provides support for OID4VP based on redirects (ISO/IEC 18013-7 Annex B) as a fallback mechanism to ensure your workflows remain functional and seamless during the rollout of this capability.
Let’s build what’s next, together
We’re excited by what Apple’s announcements unlock for the ecosystem, for our partners, and for the people they serve. As a relying party, you can now confidently design for a credential-rich future. Supply is growing. Standards are converging. Interoperability is real.
We’re proud to support this shift and see our role as enablers, building the fabric layer of trust that lets you innovate confidently, across any use case.
Our teams are already hard at work, integrating Apple’s new capabilities into our verification workflows, while continuing to support Android and other open standards. We’re here to help you navigate the future of digital identity securely, flexibly, and together.
Have questions about how to integrate this into your product or ecosystem? Let’s talk.
